Savvy Speaks: How Do You Measure Up?

The saying goes: "If you can't measure you can't manage." This week, we'd like to share some of the ways we measure the impact of the work we do.

Michele

Measure results against a defined objective

There are so many things that you could measure that it's easy to get analysis paralysis. Start by defining your objective.

For instance, do you want to generate brand awareness? If so, a good measure may be the number of conversations around your brand or traffic to your webiste.

Maybe you are trying to generate leads? A good measure may be how many people download your content or sign up for your newsletter.

Of course, you ultimately want your marketing and content to drive sales, but this is often more difficult to measure, especially if you have content that helps people early in the buying cycle.

Be realstic and specific with the results you want to see.

Wendy

Always have a defined target

You don't know where you are going until you know where you are going.

Sounds very Zen-like but as a trained Instructional Designer I've learned that you need to know what your goal is and you need to be able to break down that goal into measurable steps. How do you know how far you have come unless you know exactly where it was you started?

Breaking down the goal into bites is how you know whether or not you are making progress. Write a chapter a week and in a few months you'll have a book. Respond to 7 comments a day and soon you'll have an audience. Take 10 steps a day and eventually you'll walk across the continent.

Do nothing and you'll get nothing.

Everything you do must lead to your goal and you must know at all times how far away that goal is and how you are going to get there.

Stephanie

Follow the breadcrumb trail

Measuring the results of your efforts and initiatives starts with defining how you'll gauge your success. As Kate said, you ideally want to tie this to the impact on revenues -- and how you're helping your company achieve its strategic objectives.

As a marketer, your ultimate goal is to engage prospects and move them down the path to purchase (until they're ready to talk to sales). With that in mind, include a call to action in every content asset that points folks to the next logical step in the exploration and research process. Combine this with unique landing pages for each asset and use tools to gain insight into what prospects are doing online and offline when it comes to content consumption (such as via marketing automation or CRM systems). By aggregating this information, you can track the impact of your content on prospective buyers.

Not comfortable tackling this on your own? Consider using a marketing audit service from a company such as Predictive Marketing.

Jamie

Pay attention to the interim feedback

In addition to Big Picture measurements (i.e., looking at the final outcome of a campaign), it's important to pay attention to each step along the way and give yourself the opportunity to adapt your content and strategy based on how your audience is reacting.

I'm a big fan of baby steps. Content marketing is no small undertaking. In a perfect world, we'd each be able to launch with a fully-formed, end-to-end implementation that includes all the bells and whistles. But, in the real world, that's not always possible due to budget, resource, and management buy-in constraints. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't launch SOMEthing - and then pay close attention to the hard and soft feedback so that you can optimize and move on to the next baby step.

Kate

Look at the bottom line

These days we can measure almost every little detail of every little marketing campaign and slice and dice it every which way. But even so, trying to determine which email blast, PPC campaign or banner ad (or combination thereof) actually led to the final sale is is a little harder than it looks. It's dangerous to draw straight line comparisons - if we looked only at the final step we would have to cut all spending on PR, social media, trade shows and other "soft" marketing efforts - all of which play a huge role in getting your prospects to make that final click.

Start a multi-faceted campaign that gets your name out there. Did overall sales pick up? Great! Once it's been going for awhile and all the data starts rolling in, you'll get a better idea of which plays are paying off and which ones you can safely scrap.

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